“The best way to get ready for your trip is to share it with your friends,” Zachary Smith says.

Smith is the co-founder and CEO of Gtrot, a startup launching Monday that taps Facebook’s social graph to help travelers better plan and share their trips.

On Gtrot, which is short for globe-trotting, users login with Facebook, forward their flight or hotel confirmations to trips@gtrot.com and use the site to connect with Facebook friends who live in the city they’re visiting, have visited in the past, or with whom they have intersecting travel plans.

With one click, users can notify those friends of their upcoming plans and request advice. Gtrot will post a message to each friend’s Facebook wall and pull all of the related comments back into the site and associate them with the appropriate trip.

“Gtrot makes it easy to connect with Facebook friends who can have an impact on your trip,” Smith explains.

First started as a class project at Harvard, Gtrot went on to win the Harvard College Innovation Challenge and has piggybacked on Facebook data to graduate from a college assignment to a venture-backed business. It also followed Facebook’s college-only invite model, operating in private beta since the first version was released in late 2009 at Harvard. “It went viral at Harvard … and spread through the Ivy League,” Smith says.

The startup also attracted the attention of Lightbank, the investment vehicle of Groupon founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell. Gtrot now works out of Lightbank’s Chicago offices and has the added bonus of being able to bounce ideas off of Groupon’s upper echelon.

Gtrot is launching into a crowded space, however, with the idea of socializing travel getting a bit tired. We’ve seen Dopplr, Tripit, TripAdvisor and a host of other startups dabble in the space. Even Airbnb, once focused on the booking side of the travel equation, is now socializing the pre- and post-stay experience, letting travelers see how they’re socially connected to cities and rentals.

What makes Gtrot different? “We’re innovative in how we use Facebook data,” Smith says.

The site is adept at digging up Facebook data relevant to users’ future trips. It accesses friends’ work history, location and any other public profile elements that associate them with places. The formula allows for an ideal new user on-boarding experience — a Gtrot user need not have any friends on Gtrot to get the intended value of the service.

Gtrot also delivers daily deals, sourced from deal aggregator Local Offer Network, to members based on their destination. The user will begin to receive curated daily deals offers via email five days before a trip begins and each day thereafter, up until the last day of the trip.

Gtrot’s first 6,000 users, mostly Ivy League students, have already shared trips to more than 45,000 cities. Smith says users have been highly responsive to the daily deals emails.

Computex trade show is still a week away, but some manufacturers have already started leaking little bits of info about the devices they plan to present there.

Case in point: Asus, which launched a little Facebook campaign called “Break the Rules: Pad or Phone”, sporting only a very mystical image of a new tablet device.

Luckily, more images have leaked out over at Tech in Style, showing bits and pieces of the smooth, grey-and-black tablet that obviously wants to capture the hearts of customers who care about the design of their gadgets.

No other details about the device have emerged, so we’ll just have to wait for more clues from Asus, but the mystery tablet definitely caught our attention.

Mashable recently kicked off its Gadget of the Day Series, supported by the Energizer Inductive Charger. Each week, we’ll review five gadgets that catch our interest. In case you missed them, here are the gadgets from our first week — read on for great reviews of Polaroid’s new camera, a WiebeTech hard drive enclosure, the updated Boxee Box firmware, Microsoft’s new touch mouse and the Wow-Keys keyboard.

Looking for even more gadget reviews? This roundup will appear every weekend during the series, and you can check out all of our gadget coverage on the Tech & Gadgets channel.

Polaroid brings back the nostalgia with the Polaroid 300 Classic Instant Camera. Anyone who loves the unpredictable and often beautiful results you get with the "toy camera" category of snappers, as well as lovers of all things vintage, Lomography fans and hipsters are bound to love this model. Film is costly, but we think the design and color options could help some folks catch the photography bug.

Polaroid 300 Front View

The lens pops out of the body and doubles as the on/off button.

Polaroid 300 Top View

The viewfinder is quite a distance from the lens, which is something to bear in mind if you're shooting objects close to you.The four settings are "indoor," "cloudy," "fine" and "clear." The slit on top is where the photo comes out.

Polaroid 300 Back View

The large flap on the back is where the film loads -- it simply snaps into place.

Polaroid 300 Side View

The four AA batteries load into the side of the camera. From the angle, you can also see that it's quite a bulky gadget, even with the lens in.

Polaroid 300 Flash

The Polaroid 300 has an automatic flash. The button beneath the flash takes the picture.

Polaroid 300 Sample Photos

Two sample photos taken in strong sunlight appear washed out.

More Polaroid 300 Sample Photos

More sample photos show the kind of images you can expect from the Polaroid 300.

Photo and video junkies might rejoice at the sight of the new WiebeTech RTX220-QR, which uses a RAID implementation. It's also good for small businesses that need to keep their data mirrored or quickly accessible. The RTX-220 QR is pricey, but it does the job and offers a robust solution for hard drives.

Front View

WiebeTech RTX220-QR is built like a tank. It weighs 11.5 pounds with two drives, but it has a nice handle at the top that makes the system surprisingly portable.

Rear View

The unit comes with four different interface options:

eSATA 3.0GHz

FireWire 800

FireWire 400, via an included adaptor cable

USB 2.0

The unit also has a built-in fan for ventilation and a standard three-prong AC power adaptor.

Trayless Bay System

Inserting drives into the RTX220-QR is a cinch. Simply push the drive door open and remove the drive. Insert a new drive in its place by pushing it in and closing the door.

No proprietary drive caddies or sleds are needed and this makes it very easy to load up archived drives either to access content or to create new backups on the fly.

Powered On

The LCD display shows drive status, drive temperatures and any alerts or alarms. The output can be configured using the included software, so that fans come on at a certain temperature or alarms go off when certain drive behavior is encountered.

Boxee Box’s new firmware means it can finally support apps with commercial and subscription content, like Netflix. The Boxee Box is unique in the connected device space, because it can deliver content both from the web and from a home network — and the new Boxee web browser is one of the best implementations we've seen for surfing the web on the big screen. Plus, it doesn’t take up a lot of room.

The Boxee Box

Looks can be deceiving. The unique shape of the device may look like most pieces of home theater equipment, but it's small, unobtrusive and can easily be hidden in a corner or behind a sofa or chair.

Side Connections

The Boxee Box also has built-in WiFi and can accept full-size SD/MMC cards.

Bottom View

The bottom of the Boxee Box is made of soft rubber, which means it won't scuff up your hardwood floors.

The accent of "Boxee Green" is a nice touch.

Boxee Remote

The Boxee remote is really like two remotes in one. The standard size has two buttons and a navigation pad.

On the other side of the remote is a QWERTY-style keyboard. The buttons are soft to the touch and are easy to press. It makes entering in show names or passwords much faster than navigating around a TV menu. The one downside: It's very difficult to see the keys in a dark or dimly lit room.

Fortunately, iOS and Android devices can also be used as a remote control.

Photo courtesy of D-Link

Boxee Home Screen

The home screen of the software is inviting and should look familiar to those that have used Boxee on the Mac or PC. There are a few UI changes, but menus and sections have been designed for easy access with a remote control.

Photo courtesy of Boxee

HBO GO on Boxee

If your cable provider supports HBO GO, you can enjoy your favorite current and classic HBO programs and movies on the Boxee Box.

Thanks to HTML5 and the new and improved Boxee web browser, watching an episode of Game of Thrones or True Blood is just a remote click away.

Looking for a snazzy new mouse? Anyone stepping up from a boring old mouse, and digital nomads who want the best looking kit might find solace in Microsoft’s Arc Touch Mouse. It features a touch strip, which allows you to flick and scroll, tap to page up and down and double tap to middle click. It takes some getting used to, but it’s sleek and it travels well.

The Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse

Here, the mouse is shown with its wireless nano transmitter.

The curved design feels comfortable in the hand -- the silver bar is the touch strip which offers scrolling at the flick of a finger.

The design is pretty striking. The back end of the mouse boasts a soft-touch finish.

Folded Flat

The Arc Touch folds flat for storage and when on the go.

Side View

The Arc Touch has a slim, travel-friendly profile.

Bottom View

The Arc Touch boasts Microsoft's "BlueTrack" tech which means it will work on any surface apart from glass.

Here you can see the ridges that make up the mouse's flexible design.

Wireless Transmitter

The Wow-Keys keyboard is a regular keyboard with a slot for you to insert your iPhone 4. You can then run programs on your PC screen off your iPhone, and you can type on a regular keyboard to add data to your iPhone. It’s good for anyone who frequently inputs lots of text into an iPhone or iPod touch, and anyone who would like to use a touchpad with a desktop PC, controlling various apps using multitouch. But is it worth the price?

iPhone as Touchpad

With Mobile Mouse Pro ($1.99) installed, you can use your iPhone or iPod touch as a touchpad

Photoshop Tools Palette

Photo Keys (a $4.99 app you must buy separately) lets you have a handy tools palette close by.

Good Fit

An iPhone 4 fits nicely into this relatively thin keyboard.

iPhone In Place

If you like to place your keyboard in your lap, your iPhone will be right where you need it.

Precision Placement

It's as if they were made for each other.

Flush Mounted

There's an iPhone sitting in there, and it's not going to fall out unless you shake the keyboard vigorously.

Controls

Push the top button, and the keyboard toggles between iPhone typing and the iPhone controlling the PC or Mac. The next button locks the iPhone/iPod, and the third plays and pauses media.

Even as recently as this past week, Sony was still having trouble with the PlayStation Network, taking down its password resetting facility because of another Sony oversight: not realizing that hackers might be able to re-exploit any of the 77 million hacked accounts because of the information they obtained.

Here’s an infographic retracing the steps of Sony’s fiasco, and then assessing the financial damage using independent research data from the Ponemon Institute.

There are 500 million active users on Facebook — it’s about time you get in on the action and start a Facebook Page for your business. After all, the best marketing reaches out to consumers where they already are, and people spend more than 700 billion hours a month on the site. Exposure to that many eyeballs could translate to a lot of business for your company.

Not tech savvy? That’s not a problem — the process isn’t too technical. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you initiate your Facebook marketing campaign.

1. Create Your Page

Go to facebook.com/pages and click “Create Page” in the upper right hand corner.

The next screen asks you to select a category from the following list:

Local Business or Place

Company, Organization or Institution

Brand or Product

Artist, Band or Public Figure

Entertainment

Cause or Community

2. Fill In Information

Once you select the category for your business, you can fill in the name, address and phone number. Check the box next to “I agree to Facebook Pages Terms” and click “Get Started.” You’ll see a Page that looks like this:

3. Add a Photo

Upload a picture for your page. It can be a logo, a photo of a store or a photo of a person — whatever makes the most sense for building your brand. The file needs to be smaller than 4MB, and it can be square or a vertical rectangle. However, note that the avatar that shows up next to status updates and wall posts is square, so if you don’t want anything chopped off, square might be the way to go.

4. Suggest Your Page to Friends

Get your Page started off with some “likes” by recruiting your own friends. Start typing in names and when you drag the cursor over someone’s name, it will highlight in blue. Click once to check the person and add them to your invite. Click “Selected” to see who’s on your invite list. When you’re ready to invite, click “Send Recommendations.”

5. Import Contacts

Click on “Import Contacts” to reach out to your email contacts about your new Page. You can upload a file (Outlook, Constant Contact, .csv) or you can enter your email login info so Facebook can access people in your email contact list. Again, you can check the box next to the names you’d like to invite, and you can preview the invitation to see what it’ll look like. For people who are already on Facebook, they’ll get a “Recommended Pages” widget on their Facebook, while everyone else will get an email that looks like this:

6. Start Writing Content

Once you have a photo uploaded and have a few fans on board, you can start engaging.

For status updates, you can either share with everyone or you can target by location or by language. Targeting comes in handy if the Page is for a business with several locations in various states, especially if there is a contest, event or update that is only for a particular city.

If you want to post a link to a blog post or news story, don’t just type or paste the URL into a status update. If you do, it will look like this:

To post a link the proper way, click “Link” and paste the URL. Click “Attach.” Once you “attach” the URL, you’ll see that the text and photo from the page you’re linking to will populate automatically. You can change the title, paste different text into the snippet, and change the pictures (if there are several options, indicated by the “Choose a Thumbnail” prompt):

This is the best and cleanest way to link to another page. The post looks better and it will perform better if the link is attached instead of typed in to the status. Note that you can click on either the link or the snippet to change the text before you click “Share.”

7. Get a Vanity URL

Once you have 25 fans on your Facebook Page, any of a Page’s admins can reserve a vanity URL so that your Facebook URL is www.facebook.com/yourbusinessnamehere. Go to the Username page, select the Page name from the dropdown menu and then write in the name you’d like to use. Click “Check Availability.” If it’s available, a prompt will ask, “Are you sure you want to set [URL] as [Facebook Page]‘s username?” Click confirm to lock in that URL — and keep in mind that you can’t change the URL for a Page once you confirm.

8. Use the Tools That Are Available

Facebook Insights is a great tool that can help you figure out when to post and what kind of content does well. Measuring social media success is complicated, but many brands focus on engagement. Activity on your Page is a good sign, and you can keep tabs on activity by clicking “Facebook Insights” on the right sidebar, just below the admins.

8. Assign Other Admins

Speaking of admins, you can invite several people to run the Page and post content — links and statuses will come through as written by the Page and not the individual. (Note, the statuses above were generated when I was on my personal account — but the posts came through from “My Sweet New Candy Shoppe” because I am an admin.)

In the “Admins” section of the sidebar on the right, click “See All.” A new page will populate with the names of the admins. To make someone else an admin, just type in his name (it’ll populate in real time) — there is no limit to the number of admins a Page can have. Admins are kept abreast of happenings on the Page — including comments and posts so that your company can interact with its fans — via email.

Foxconn announced a third employee has died as a result of injuries sustained in that explosion on May 20 inside the factory that makes iPads. In a statement, Foxconn revealed that 15 others were injured in the accident, and six of the injured had been treated in a hospital and released.

The explosion originated in “one of the polishing workshops at our company's Hongfujin Precision Electronics (Chengdu) Co. Ltd. facility in Chengdu,” according to the Foxconn statement. The company is still investigating the cause of the accident, but said the initial findings show “the accident was caused by an explosion of combustible dust in a duct.”

All production at the factory has been halted, but the company expects to resume operations on Tuesday, according to M.I.C. Gadget. The site reports that the Chinese government in Chengdu has taken over the plant, censoring the information flow to the extent that local newspapers aren’t reporting about it.

With numerous workers committing suicide at the company’s Shenzhen-based iPad plant last year, Foxconn attempted to remedy the situation by giving them raises, but still needed to increase the production capacity to meet increasing demand. As a result, the new factory was built, an enormous eight-building complex hastily constructed in a record-breaking 70 days to accommodate the voracious demand for the iPad 2.

Soon after the factory was built, according to M.I.C. Gadget’s Star Chang, Apple’s inspection team visited the facility, taking two days to inspect the buildings, production lines and “especially the workers’ dormitories.” After its inspection, Apple approved the plant for manufacturing iPads.

So is this what it takes to bring a $499 iPad to our doorsteps? What are the limits of human costs that consumers are willing to accept in the manufacturing of their electronics products? Would you be willing to pay, say, an extra $100 for an iPad if you could be assured that those workers who manufactured it were toiling in safe conditions, paid fair wages and not driven to suicide?

We all have that one family member that just can’t detach himself from technology. On that hypothetical beach vacation, this chap couldn’t be bothered to peel his eyes off his Twitter feed and heaven forbid if you ask him to turn off his iPhone. Then again, maybe that über-connected social mediaite is you.

If you or someone you know tends to spend an entire vacation typing away and staring at backlit screens, it may be time for an intervention. Being “constantly connected” can take a toll on your health — we recommend cutting back on social media and tech usage when you’re on vacation. Everyone needs a break.

If you can’t completely disconnect, your social media proficiency might come in handy when your family is trying to coordinate the trip. There’s a ton of mobile apps that can help improve your vacation, and you’re probably just the person to sharpen up your family’s social media game. Here are our tips for utilizing your connected time for improving your family’s vacation. The next time you’re staring at your smartphone in Tahiti, you’ll at least have a vacation-related excuse.

Find Nearby Recommendations & Deals with Location Apps

Foursquare Explore tab

Use location-based apps, such as Foursquare and Gowalla, to find nearby attractions to visit while you’re strolling around new cities. Or, while your family is getting ready for the day, why not take an extra 15 minutes to peruse nearby tips left by other users?

We recommend using Foursquare’s Explore tab, where users can query for recommendations or dive into food, coffee, nightlife, shops and arts and entertainment recommendations served up by Foursquare and ranked by what's most interesting to the user. For example, if you’re interesting in taking in a few museums, simply search for “museum” within the Explore tab. You can narrow down locations based on distance or whether your friends (or you) have left recommendations. If your friends have checked in at the location or if you have marked a “to-do” at the location, these details will be noted.

As an added bonus, it’s likely that local venues listed on Foursquare or other location-based apps offer specials. The Roger Smith Hotel in New York City, for instance, offers “free coffee, tea, or #bacon any time of day” if you check in with Foursquare or Facebook Places. You’ll probably get kudos with your caffeine-obsessed cousin for finding free coffee, props from that weird friend who wears bacon-scented perfume, and Aunt Frugal will love you for passing on shopping discounts.

Keep Track of Your Family with Group Messaging

Beluga iPhone app

Group messaging services really took off earlier this year. Some of the most popular group messaging apps include GroupMe, Beluga, Fast Society and Kik. They all include the same basic features and are based on the ability to message a group of people simultaneously.

It isn’t always possible — or ideal — for your entire family to stick together during the full length of a vacation. From time to time, smaller groups will split off and enjoy varying activities. It’s nice to have a bit of space, but when you want to reconvene, group messaging is a great way to figure out a meeting spot and time.

While on vacation, hotel guests should take advantage of these quick-to-respond tweeters by following their hotel’s Twitter account and asking for advice about hotel offerings and local attractions when necessary.

Hotel Gansevoort’s Social Media Manager Joshua Pelz monitors chatter on Twitter, Facebook and message boards for guest requests. “Hospitality is about serving the guest needs, however they may come in,” he says. “The ability to ‘anticipate’ a guest’s needs before the traditional request is made is highly beneficial to all departments.”

Hotel concierge service via Twitter is rare at this point. Many hotel groups haven’t adopted social media strategies, while others have found different digital outlets. The Chatwal New York and the Vikram Chatwal Hotels properties, for example, uses Twitter to communicate with guests, but don’t officially offer concierge services via the microblogging service. “All the new hotels have such high-tech in-room services (digital) that it would take away from the efficiency,” says Brian Simpson, director of digital media and social hospitality at Vikram Chatwal Hotels.

Charles Yap, director of global brand communications and social media at InterContinental Hotels Group noted that its hotel group is taking concierge services to the next level by enabling guests to chat with its concierges using Apple’s video chat feature, FaceTime. The hotel also launched the “Concierge Insider Guides” iPad app in 2010 to offer expert advice on 120 destinations.

Post Occasional Photo Updates for Friends & Family

Vacation photos on Instagram

Social media is a great way to stay in contact with your friends and family who weren’t lucky enough to join you on vacation. You can keep them apprised of your whereabouts or make them jealous with awesome scenic shots, if that’s your cup of tea.

Status updates are lovely, but photos are where it’s at. We recommend trying photo sharing apps such as Instagram and PicPlz to take, edit and share photos. Most photo sharing apps on the market enable users to instantly share to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, where friends and family members usually congregate.

Mashable recently took a family vacation of sorts to host the Mashable Connect conference at Walt Disney World. Many of my friends and co-workers were sharing photos and generating conversations across a number of social channels. It was a great way to not only let my family and friends know what I was up to, but to see what other conference attendees were doing in other areas of the conference and park.

Your Social Media Travel Tips

How do you use social media and technology when you’re on vacation? Share your tips for maintaining a balance between unplugging and utilizing social media to enhance your vacation in the comments below.

Love her or not, it’s become increasingly obvious that Lady Gaga knows how to promote her albums. Case in point: Watch her score another home run on the season finale of Saturday Night Live this weekend, promoting her new album, Born This Way.

Revisiting and revising her Grammy Awards performance of the title cut from Born This Way, first she emerges from an egg, and with the help of some of her dancers she executes a mid-song wardrobe modification in which she somehow ends up with a baby bump.

This is powerful stuff. No wonder she has 10 million Twitter followers. There’s something naughty about all this three-chord mayhem, but it’s a good kind of naughty. How about it, commenters? Has Gaga gone too far?

Mashable has finally returned from Disney World (also known as the happiest place on earth) with the conclusion of Connect. Since returning, we’ve have no time to slump, turning out another great week of tools and resources for your social media pleasure.

Read on for some great stories about how to use Gmail Labs to boost your productivity, 13 alternative ways to get your news online, and a ton of resource roundups for developers, designers, and small businesses alike.

Looking for even more social media resources? This guide appears every weekend, and you can check out all the lists-gone-by here any time.

HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Google Reader While social news is all the rage, RSS is still a great way to consume large quantities of online content. Here’s how to optimize the web’s most popular feed reader.